For effective utilization of mobile network resources, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) proposes MBMS, a point-to-multipoint service that allows the delivery of data from one data source in a mobile network to multiple users. MBMS enables the sharing of network resources and increases the utilization of network resources, especially, air interface resources. The 3GPP-defined MBMS realizes the multicast and broadcast of not only low-rate text messages but also high-rate multimedia data.
For better allocation of MBMS user service resources and better service development such as the placement of programs and advertisements (ads) according to the MBMS audience size, it is necessary to count the audience of MBMS. Through researches, the inventor finds that in the prior MBMS model, broadcast and enhanced broadcast services do not support the counting of MBMS audience, but the counting of MBMS audience is supported in multicast mode, while the contexts of user equipments (UEs) must be stored in each NE in the network, which consumes too many network resources.